My mother, Freda Westwood, who has died aged 87, spent her adult life working for the Labour party. In 1960 the party's West Midlands regional organiser, Bob Chamberlain, was looking for a tough constituency agent, although the job would be unpaid. Freda was a no-nonsense, rather direct individual, unafraid to speak her mind to anyone. Her husband, George, suggested she would be good at the job, and Freda was appointed

In the general election of 1964, the Labour MP for Smethwick, Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat to the Tory Peter Griffiths in a campaign notorious for the use of the infamous slogan: "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour." The actor Andrew Faulds was selected as candidate to fight the next election, and Freda was appointed his full-time agent. She was determined that Faulds should remain focused and directed, a position not always to his liking. In 1966 Griffiths was defeated.

In 1969 Freda became assistant regional organiser and women's officer, but remained at Smethwick for the 1970 election where she was assisted by, among others, Matthew (now Lord) Oakeshott. Chamberlain died in 1977 and Freda became his successor – one of the first women to be a Labour party regional organiser. She remained in the post until her retirement in 1986.

She was born Freda Barker, the eldest daughter of a coalmining father and a cleaner mother, in Birmingham. She left school in 1938 to work in a drapery store, and the following year moved to the Birmingham ammunition works Kynoch, making bullets. In 1942 she transferred to the newly built Spitfire factory in Castle Bromwich, where she remained until the end of the second world war. She met and married George Westwood in 1941 and I was born in 1950. Freda supplemented the family's income by making sleeping bonnets at home for a Woolworths sub-contractor.

Freda and George joined the Labour party in 1948. In 1999 they were presented with certificates of merit for their outstanding service, presented by the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in the presence of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd. They remained active in their local party right up until Freda's death.

She is survived by George, me and my wife, Jacqueline, and her grandchildren, James, Kathryn and Christine.